My level of concern and dismay is very, very high,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who is now a lecturer in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “It’s not that I have any particular problem with the people who are running for the Republican nomination. I just don’t know how they can run hard enough or fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the Bush administration.”

The striking thing is that they aren’t even trying to escape. I mean, sure, Rudy Giuliani will escape Bush’s opposition to taxpayer financed abortions, but on the key things that have made the Bush administration such an incredible failure, all the contenders are marching off the cliff in lockstep.

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